I was with my family this weekend for the fourth and asked a few questions to get some of these things straightened out. First, the suggestion made earlier was correct. My ancestors (down one branch) were French people who fled to Holland to escape persecution, not the other way around. Also, it seems my family hasn't been in the US as long as I'd thought. One of my great-grandparents was actually born in Holland, and on the other branches for which we have information, you just need to go back one more generation.
One of my grandmothers wrote up her life history, and my mom made me a copy. It's quite interesting, though it unfortunately ends rather abruptly when she got married (she's still alive).
Also, I discovered that a pretty significant number of my forebears had nervous breakdowns after suffering some hardship, and wound up in institutions. Not altogether encouraging...
Dave -
I would not worry to much about the skeletons of those forebears - life back then was incredibily tough, and if disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, poverty, persecution, etc. didn't do you in, why would the fragile psyche be any hardier? I had one great grandfather who ran off and abandoned his family, I had another great grandmother who committed suicide, and many many relatives who never married and lived at home with their parents until they passed away. For example, in one family of nine children living to adulthood, only 5 married, and of those five, one had no children, two had only one each, one had two, and the remaining one had four. People often did not marry if they could not afford to. Many married late, in spite of what the history books claim. Many were widowed early on even if they did marry. Finally, mental disease was really unknown as we define it today, so confining people for these types of symptoms was not at all uncommon. It also may have had nothing to do with mental illness at all, it could have been things like epilepsy, stroke, mental delay, incurable disease or illness, even being destitute.